


the morning

by fivepairs



Category: Crooked Media RPF
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-20
Updated: 2018-10-20
Packaged: 2019-08-04 20:54:17
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,632
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16354124
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fivepairs/pseuds/fivepairs
Summary: Ronan has been building a castle for as long as he can remember.But then inevitably, the castle begins to fall. And when the building crumbles, when the rubble piles around him, when the dust settles in his nostrils and the oxygen nearly doesn't reach his lungs, it’s Jon that digs him out.





	the morning

Ronan has been building a castle for as long as he can remember.

It started when he was little, always thinking and musing and wondering; already too much, too early, too fast. Every raised voice poured the foundation, every cry settled the concrete, every rumour placed a new brick in the wall. Every off-putting look, every squirm, every tantrum - they built the battlements. By the time other kids his age could talk, Ronan was already an architect.

He’s built the castle higher over the years, brick by brick. The failure of his MSNBC show adds a brick. The slow, never-ending _non-_ progress of his thesis, the first academic thing he’s never quite sailed through: another brick. When the darkness in his family resurfaces, just a shadow from the angular recesses of his memories, he builds a gate.

It’s a strong fortress now, rigid and impenetrable, sitting high and proud on the tallest hill, protecting himself and his mother and his siblings and the very, very few others who have earned their way inside. And then suddenly, something happens: the hard things keep building up his defenses, but now, so too do the brave things. The sources, the people, the _women,_ they add their cannons to his walls and fuse their concrete through his bricks and he will keep this wall up for her, and her, and her, and him, and all of them, because he is the fortress. _He_ is the strong thing. They are safe behind his fortifications, as safe as anyone can be. He will protect them. He’ll chase that truth, piece by piece, lead by lead, source by source. He _must._ He can’t let those under his protection down.

But then inevitably, the castle begins to fall. And when the building crumbles, when the rubble piles around him, when the dust settles in his nostrils and the oxygen nearly doesn't reach his lungs, it’s Jon that digs him out.

 

*

*

 

He meets Jon at one of the boring, well-attended parties that DC is famous for. He’d heard of him before, of course - no one is truly a stranger in this town - but Ronan had been totally unprepared for the full effect of being in Jon’s presence. Lovett, as everyone seems to affectionately call him (even if only to differentiate him from the _other_ speechwriting Jon), is sarcastic and witty and fucking _magnetic,_ really, in a way that Ronan didn’t know people could be. He’s handsome, too, with a truly excellent smile and a mischievous glint in his eye that promises him to be anything but boring.

Ronan falls hard and fast. Jon is in the process of moving to Los Angeles, and it’s truly awful timing, but this thing between them feels honest, feels real, feels _important_ somehow, so they decide to give long distance a try.

It starts, and it never ends. And somewhere along the line, even though he’s the proverbial son of Hollywood, Ronan realizes that in this fairy tale it’s Jon who’s the prince.

 

*

*

 

He’s had a lot of breakdowns this year.

There was the one in the bathroom at the NBC News studio, where he locked himself in a stall like a fifteen-year-old girl and did everything that he could not to cry. Not trusting the apparent absence of others in the bathroom, he’d pulled out his cell and texted Jon with furious emotions. Even though it was eight o’clock in the morning in Los Angeles and Jon should’ve, theoretically, been on his way to work, just like every other time Ronan has needed him, Jon had been there.

(The responses had come back quickly and fluidly: a blend of characteristic humour, uncharacteristic calming platitudes, and classic logic. _You didn’t become the youngest surgical resident at Eastman Medical Center just to have a panic attack in the bathroom at work, Doogie,_ followed by _they’re assholes and you deserve better but try to remember that there’s a longer game to be played here._

Ronan would later find out during an evening Facetime call that Jon had been running late for work (typical), and after stopping to talk him off the ledge, had wound up almost missing the recording of the weekly ad copy. This had filled him with guilt until Jon, clearly reading Ronan’s face as always, had rolled his eyes and dismissively made a crack about his codependency with Favreau not pre-empting the other Jon’s ability to be alone in a room for fifteen minutes and read a few fucking poorly-written sentences into a microphone.

“He’d have survived,” Jon had concluded. “The story always ends well for you handsome types. You get the job, you win the race, your kiss wakes the princess -”

Ronan had snorted at that. “I don’t think falling asleep on my mom’s couch qualifies you to be Sleeping Beauty.”

“Well it can’t be _you,_ Sleeping Beauty is literally unconscious for a bulk of that movie and you haven’t had eight hours of consecutive sleep since 1996.”

“I slept for nine hours last Christmas,” Ronan had shot back, “so don’t you _dare -”_

“Go to bed, Ronan.”)

Then there was the breakdown in the back of the cab, the one from October, the one from the story he’s told to countless journalists and friends since everything had happened with NBC. There were others in between, of course, all of varying crisis levels though likely equally annoying, and Jon had been there to talk him through all of them.

And there’s this one too, the one he’s in the middle of right now, induced by too little sleep and the scent of his always-missed Pundit (the queen herself napping at the foot of the bed) embedded in the fabric of the comforter that he currently has his face pressed into. Jon sits beside him, cross-legged, his thigh propping up Ronan’s cheek.

They’re in Los Angeles at Jon’s house. They’re dressed for a birthday party - Neal’s, Ronan thinks, but his brain is so fuzzy and overwhelmed that he could be misremembering - so Jon is actually wearing jeans for once, and he looks good. It’s going to be fun. Ronan is officially in town to interview some sources, but one of them has just canceled their meeting for the following morning and his sperm donor is in the news again and he’s been doing this for a year and a half now (or maybe thirty years) and maybe he just can’t do it anymore or maybe he just needs to sleep? - just a little nap, just twenty minutes, then they can go out, then they can see their friends, then Ronan can live his life, but maybe the nap should be thirty minutes, or an hour, or six, because he’s tired, he’s just so, so tired, and every time one of these assholes falls another one pops back up and it just feels like they’re never, never, never going to come out on top --

Jon’s voice cuts through Ronan’s tirade, which he realizes (a bit too late) he’s been saying out loud. “Hey, you’re good,” he’s saying, “we’re good, Ronan, it’s all good.”

His fingers are in Ronan’s hair now, short nails scratching lightly at his scalp, and it feels so good that Ronan’s dangerously close to falling asleep after only a few moments.

Slowly, Jon’s fingertips still. “Take off your clothes, Ronan,” he directs, his voice low and soothing. “Get into bed.”

Ronan can barely muster the energy to pull himself off of Jon. “Then what?”

Jon looks at him, amused. “Then pull the comforter up to your chin and close your eyes. Have you actually forgotten _how_ to sleep? Is that bad?”

He doesn’t understand. “But the party -”

“I canceled,” Jon informs him, lifting his other hand to reveal his phone. “Neal will understand.”

Ronan’s eyes close again. “Sorry,” he whispers, shaking his head. He brings the heels of his palms to his face. “I’m stopping you from doing things. You should - you should go. I -”

“Stop being such a martyr. This is what I want to do.” Jon slides off the mattress, hauls a slightly disgruntled Pundit up to curl against Ronan’s chest, then moves his Switch from the dresser to his bedside table.

Ronan watches as Jon pulls his shirt off and shuffles to his ensuite bathroom. It’s barely nine and he knows he should make Jon go out, but he seems to be getting ready for bed so that seems to settle that. Ronan sees Jon reach for his quip toothbrush and his chest begins to ache just slightly, his heart constricting and then swelling with the pain and pleasure of just how _much_ he loves Jon. His head is messy and full, as always, of too many swirling thoughts, but one strong-arms its way to the forefront: lucky. He’s so fucking lucky.

Jon finishes in the bathroom and pads back into the bedroom, pausing at the end of the bed to tug off his jeans and socks. “You gonna sleep like that?” he asks.

Ronan ignores the question, instead choosing to quietly murmur, “I love you. You know that, right?”

In response, Jon rolls his eyes and slips beneath the comforter. He settles against the headboard and reaches for his Switch. “Well I didn’t think you kept me around for eye candy,” he replies dryly, “because we both know that’s not my role in this relationship.”

“Don’t,” Ronan cuts in. His exhaustion is not overwhelming enough that he is going to ignore a comment like that from Jon. He never does; or tries not to, anyway, because while he knows they’re borne of Jon’s insecurities - especially in relation to Mia’s impossible genetics, which he’s done nothing to earn - he also knows that Jon is _wrong._ “Do I need to recite my list of things I like about your body?”

The Switch’s screen blinks on. “As much as I like that, it usually leads to something _else,_ and I want you to _sleep,_ Ronan,” Jon orders. “Brush your teeth and go to sleep. Or don’t. You’ll still be beautiful in the morning. Either way, Zelda is calling my name.”

Ronan smiles through a deep yawn. He’s known Jon long enough to know when he’s being dismissed. “She’s a demanding girlfriend,” he comments.

Jon snorts. “Yeah, well. I know what that’s like.” He winks at Ronan, who makes a face at him in return.

Before he gets off the bed, Ronan kisses Pundit’s head through her fur. It’s getting long, he thinks; she needs a haircut soon. Jon will have to take her. Maybe one day, he thinks, he’ll be here all the time, and that can be his job.

 

*

*

 

Because Ronan is still on eastern time, he wakes up before Jon, and he gets to stare at him while he sleeps. His Switch is by his knees, the battery now dead, his unruly curls sprawled against the pillow, head turned in Ronan’s direction, Pundit between them.

A lot of people get pieces of Ronan. His mother, his siblings, his nieces. His friends. His sources now, too. His coworkers. The media. The world. Everyone gets something.

And because Ronan is a people pleaser, because he's lived his life seeking to always be a little out of his depth (never quite finding it, never quite not), he tries to make sure that what they get is good. He's polite. He's reasonable. He's measured, the way he knows a journalist should be, because he's not only representing himself: he's his employer, especially in public, and like always, he's someone's son, someone _known,_ someone who’s been through hell and back with another someone and for whom Ronan never, ever, ever wants to make anything worse or more complicated than it already has been.

But despite all the rhetoric and hyperbole in the ether about him, Ronan is one person. He does not have Hermione Granger’s Time Turner. He works and works and works and then works some more, offering a smile and whatever is left of his wit and well-mannered breeding, until he's spent. At this point, he seeks nothing but a recharge so that he can give it all again the next day, because this work is important and he'll only have this moment to do it once and more than almost anything else in the world, he believes that.

So he goes home empty-handed, ready to fall into bed, left with only his anxieties and his latent temper and the lows of the day, and it's this, this box of broken leftover emotions, that he gives to Jon.

Sometimes, Ronan is lucky - he's visiting, or Jon is, and when he comes home he gets to collapse onto the mattress, lay back against Jon's chest, and listen to the sound of his comforting breathing until he falls asleep. Sometimes Jon’s waiting but Ronan’s exhaustion has transcended the need for sleep, and he's curt with his words and his actions and his mood to the point of bordering on rudeness.

And then sometimes still - more often than not - Jon’s on the phone, because at the end of the day he still lives in New York and Jon still lives in Los Angeles, and that means that he's gotten really good at breaking down over the phone. Ronan thinks he's worse this way, when he can't touch Jon and can only hear him, because it's hard to see Jon's face and not want to be the reason there's a smile on it, but it's relatively easier to be snippy without a sad, scrunched-up frown to ward him off.

No matter how Ronan is, though, Jon is the same. He's sarcastic and irreverent but always loyal and passionate and _right,_ so fucking annoyingly right, and he always knows what balance to strike, at least with Ronan. He isn't sure how, but Jon does it all the same: he's delicate when Ronan is particularly vulnerable, tough when Ronan deserves it, and characteristically funny but pointed when Ronan’s inside his own head and what he really needs is to be drawn out.

_These stories are important, but be safe, I didn't get cancellation coverage for the Galapagos trip._

In the end, it never truly matters _how_ he has Jon, just that he _does._ Ronan gives away pieces of himself every day, sometimes more pieces than there are to take - but Jon, his funny, wickedly smart, insecure, perfect, loud, irrepressible _Jon -_ he fills the void they leave behind, crowding the empty spaces with words and embraces that don’t need to be targeted to be effective. They just need to be. _He_ just needs to be.

It feels good at the end of the day to take something back, and Ronan is glad that Jon is what he gets to take back.

Sometimes, he wonders what Jon gets, other than the lonely parts of essentially being single without any of the benefits. He shows up to birthdays and funerals and weddings alone. He wakes up alone. He raises their dog alone. Ronan sees pictures of Hanna and Emily at live shows and he knows that Jon is the only one without his person there. He wonders if he’s even missed or if Jon is just used to it by now (because if you’ve never really had something is it possible to mourn its absence?), and he doesn’t know which is worse.

He hopes that whatever _it_ is, whatever Jon gets to take back, that it’s enough. He gets annual vacations and two busy nights a month, gets an exorbitant phone bill, gets garbage duty, gets red-eyes for meetings that could be phone calls, gets irregular and thinly veiled affectionate tweets. He vows that one day he’ll spend his time making all of this up to Jon, that one day he’ll _know_ it’s enough.

But for now, they have the morning.

*

**end**


End file.
